More Alive Than Dead

It's been six years since State of Decay 3 was announced during a 2020 Xbox Games Showcase, and in the time since, the gaming landscape – as well as the company of its then-parent company, Xbox – has shifted dramatically. Not only has Xbox adjusted its business model and transitioned to a new leadership team, but we have seen the entirety of the Xbox Series X/S generation to this point play out in the time since the announcement. The debut trailer seemed to come and go with little substance beyond the 2020 trailer, and Xbox's business woes became so dire that many worried State of Decay 3 would never see the light of day. Thankfully, I had the chance to not only watch a hands-off session with the developers at Undead Labs, but spend some time claiming some encampments, destroying a Plague Heart, and, of course, mowing down hordes of zombies.

Emergent storytelling is the name of the game with State of Decay. As you recruit survivors to beef up your encampment, you must ensure you have the resources and weaponry to help your group survive and defend its home, with continually evolving variables to account for at each and every step. As with State of Decay 2, you must carefully consider which survivors you bring on missions. For example, one character might be better in combat, while another is better in negotiations. But it's never that simple; in my demo, one character had various combat-focused perks, but had a negative trait of being easily overwhelmed. You can evolve those negative traits by completing tasks associated with those negative traits – in this case, killing zombies in high-pressure situations – but it never fully goes away.

In State of Decay 3, moving around feels much better. This is never more evident than when driving a car; it's clear Undead Labs worked hard to make vehicles feel better than in this game's predecessor. And you'll need it, as the Plague Hearts, epicenters of zombie infestations, now operate on networks, where a single Plague Heart has far-reaching effects. Now, if a Plague Heart is too strong for your current survivor squad, you can go clear out other, less intense areas within the network to weaken the central Heart. But don't worry, even when we attempted a Plague Heart on the lowest severity with three people, it was still a pretty intense battle.

Though my gameplay session was entirely multiplayer, Undead Labs assures me that single-player remains a keen focus for the studio, despite hoping that people who typically play alone turn it into a more social experience. "Personally, I play the bejesus out of this in single-player, so that's one of the ways in which I get a lot of validation that it's still working," executive producer Patrick Hooley says. "But our alpha [test] audience is a great proof point for it because we're historically so single-player based. We wanted to bring those players in to experience our multiplayer and our single-player to make sure that we're still going to be satisfying for that. For our hardcore audience that loves single-player, they're saying 'Yes, this is totally working,' and we're even getting some of those folks who are historically single-player heavy to dabble in multiplayer and have their perspectives shift and think like, 'Oh, this might actually be the best way to play the game.'"

Perhaps most exciting to that end, Undead has implemented a new system letting you invite people to join your save file. Once you do this, they can jump in and play whether you're there or not, sharing the world, as well as its characters. However, with choice, consequence, and permadeath serving as crucial components for the State of Decay franchise, you'd be wise to carefully consider who you invite to share your save file.

After being announced in 2020, State of Decay 3 went largely silent. However, in that time, Undead Labs has clearly been hard at work. Following the less-than-stellar launch of State of Decay 2, which Hooley describes to me as "the hair-on-fire, the ship's-got-some-holes-in-it" phase, Undead focused on not only getting that game into a much better state, but applying lessons learned from that game's lifecycle to ensure State of Decay 3 is in a much better place. And based on my hands-on time with the game, this early build is already more stable than State of Decay 2 was at launch.

"By pushing to a live audience as early as May of this year, that's helped us get a little bit battle-hardened, and we're going to get even more battle-hardened before we actually launch this thing," Hooley says. "The single biggest lesson we learned is building the game with the community. State of Decay 2 had a little bit of a rocky launch, and now we're very proud of where we got it to."

And of course, it goes without saying that Undead Labs has gone through more stress this year than just ironing out bugs. Earlier this summer, the studio, which was acquired by Xbox in 2018, was reported to be on the chopping block for potential closure amid Xbox's sweeping layoffs and cost-cutting measures. Thankfully for the studio and its fans, Undead was sold to an undisclosed new owner shortly after those reports, giving State of Decay 3 a new lease on life and a much higher chance of release. State of Decay 3 is scheduled to arrive in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.